[5] SEA: Streb Extreme Action
...I ask, how can movement elicit sorrow, fright, humor, excitement,
and the desire to live a better life—all at once.
—Elizabeth Streb2
1
By some process of abstraction (or so it seemed to me) the choreographer imagined an animated geometry in Time, a very real but brief flying in the space-time continuum. The dancers shoot left and right from their trampoline across intersecting curving lines in Space and Time from A toward B, from C toward D, and then right into the audience’s imagination. In the very idea of air, in the biomechanics of the projected, soaring, weighted body, in the algorithms of lift and duration, the idea of flight keeps humming.
in a room writing
poems, repeating things I heard
when the dancers spoke
about that point before they
fell heavily back to earth
any catapult
makes you picture weightlessness
thinking you can fly
a short threatening second
when anything could happen
hundreds of such seconds
disparate and unconnected
come together then—
in your imagination
you are a soaring eagle
2
So, now, here’s a little truth from the other side: no matter how high you fly you have to come down. Even if your lust to fly is bigger than the sky itself, you will still have to come down. Imagine the greatest ever success at flying, whether you’re a bird or a rocket or a just a jumping man, sooner or later, you have to come down. This is simply physics, of course, but also psychology. When you try to fly, especially when you succeed, and you want so badly to stay up, you can’t understand why you have to come down; but when you come down the truth is waiting for you and slams your body down against the earth.
though we strain against
gravity’s chains, pushing up
just like Sisyphus
or Jack and Jill, we come tumbling
down to earth. it is one thing
to go up, but still
another not to come down
take a rocket ship
past the moon, go out beyond
the stars, flying weightlessly
there is still coming
down when the rocket plays out
at the galaxy’s
edge, motor and inertia
winding down. we cannot fly
3
It was a mix of childhood conceits, the towel tied around my neck, the S imagined on my shirt, and the fantasy flying. I remember it now, closing my eyes and seeing myself fly in defiance of all limitation. On a Ferris wheel once, stopped at the zenith, the gondola gently rocking on its old, heavily greased iron bearings, I was both afraid of dying but indifferent to the leaden world below. If it ended here, this was a hell of a way to go, so I stood up and rocked the gondola more, knowing it would never fall off, but at the same time terrified it would. This was what the existential edge felt like, and right then I knew there was no going back.
we are bracketed
by dreams and reality
the greatest pleasures
lasting only a second
but the memories live on
events in our heads
we feel and remember what
we felt, and moments
when the body spoke to us
live on in habits
buffeted by winds
through nerve endings and thinking
to put self together
nothing holds still, it all goes
through the wringer
Bio: Charles D. Tarlton
